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Wes Kantor drove through Whitehall this past winter and didn’t like what he saw in the streets.
Kids on their way to school were avoiding the snow-clogged sidewalks by walking on the plowed
roads.

“We’re talking kindergarten to fifth-graders walking in the street,” said Kantor, a Whitehall
city councilman. “It was safer to walk in the street ... than to walk in the knee-deep snow on the
sidewalk.”

Kantor checked with the city’s code-enforcement office to see whether it was enforcing a 1973
ordinance requiring residents to keep their sidewalks clear of snow and ice. It turned out they
hadn’t written a citation in more than a decade.

And so, Whitehall council members took an unusual action: They wiped the old sidewalk-shoveling
rule from the books.

“Basically all I did was, you know, some housekeeping,” Kantor said. “It’s kind of ridiculous to
have a law on the books that can’t be enforced.”

Many central Ohio cities have some form of ordinance addressing who’s responsible for clearing
sidewalks. They vary in language — Bexley, for example, excuses people who physically can’t do it
and can’t find help — but they all express the same sentiment: Clear it out or face the
consequences.

But often, there aren’t consequences. Some cities say a 1993 Ohio Supreme Court ruling in a
Columbus case where a woman slipped on the snow-covered ice outside of a friend’s home rendered
their local ordinances unenforceable. The court said the homeowners weren’t to blame.

“Living in Ohio during the winter has its inherent dangers,” Ohio Supreme Court Justice Andrew
Douglas wrote, saying that landowners don’t owe it to the general public to remove ice and snow
from public sidewalks “even where a city ordinance requires the landowner to keep the sidewalks
free of ice and snow.”

Still, most cities keep those laws around, either because they do try to enforce them — as in
the case of Columbus and Bexley, though punishment in both cities rarely progresses beyond a
warning — or because they hope their existence encourages good behavior. Reynoldsburg Mayor Brad
McCloud believes the latter works.

“We try to appeal to home owners’ good will,” McCloud wrote in an email. “While I never
misrepresent what the law is, I also don’t go out of my way to publicize it either.”

In Whitehall, the unenforceable law didn’t sit well with Kantor. It felt like intimidation.
Instead, he pushed to repeal it and instead form a kind of city volunteer shoveling network. On
Tuesday, the council voted unanimously to do away with the old ordinance.

“I don’t want anything in the law to intimidate our residents and businesses,” Kantor said. “It
just shouldn’t be on the books.”